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Salt Lake City, Utah
PROLOGUE
“YOU WANT stories of Siris, do you? Stories of the Deathless who fought for ordinary men?”
“Yes.”
“Stories of the youth reborn a thousand times, raised in each incarnation to try—and fail—to slay the God King? Stories of the man who did not know he was immortal?”
“Yes.”
“Stories of Siris abandoned? Locked in the Vault of Tears, betrayed by the Worker of Secrets? Left to rot by the one who should have been his ally? These are the stories you seek?”
“They are.”
“Well, good. Because stories . . . stories I have. Too many stories. Stories like rats in the wheat, fat and glutted upon my thoughts and memories. It’s well past time that someone heard them . . .”
CHAPTER
ONE
SIRIS SNAPPED open his eyes and rolled. He had only a few moments before—
Hands grabbed his hair, yanking his head upward. A knee against his back forced him down to the cold stone.
Vision blurry, Siris twisted, trying to claw at the hands holding him. He had to—
The hands smashed Siris’s face down into the stone ground.
All went black.
CONSCIOUSNESS returned to Siris like an eagle spreading its wings. His mind flooded with sensation. The cold ground. His face resting in a pool of nearly dried blood, sticky against his skin. The stale scent of the prison.
He took a deep breath and threw himself to his feet, turning to swing. He opened his eyes to a blurry world of shadows and filtered light.
Those shadows caught him, tripped him, then slammed him back against the ground.
Siris growled. His primal instincts knew where his enemy would be, and he kicked upward into a soft stomach. Connecting felt so satisfying.
The shadows cursed. Siris pulled his foot back and rolled to his feet.
A weight slammed him backward against the wall. Siris writhed, but hands grabbed his head and jerked it to the side.
Snap.
All went black.
SIRIS WAITED for his body to restore itself.
First, his soul tried to flee, to escape to a rebirthing chamber. That was far better than returning to a body that had; been defeated—a fallen body was a compromised body. Innate Deathless programming tried to send his soul, his Q.I.P., to safety.
Siris registered this as a vague sensation, tangible only in the most fleeting of ways. Like the memory of a taste. A sense of uncontrolled soaring, a panicked flight.
Then a wall, like invisible glass. His soul was rebuffed as it had been each time before. It could not break out of the prison, and was instead forced back. Back into the imperfect body, the trapped body.
That body belonged to an immortal. It would restore itself, given time.
Eventually, consciousness swelled in his mind, and he regained control. He tried to feign death. His thinking was fuzzy, his eyes not fully restored, he needed to—
“You think I don’t notice you, Ausar?” a voice said from nearby. Siris felt warm breath on his neck. “You think I can’t hear you stir as you struggle back to life?”
Siris snapped his eyes open and reached for the figure above him, his ancient enemy. He could see only a blur.
“I put your eyes out each time I kill you,” the God King growled, grabbing Siris’s head and smashing it down against the floor.
Pain.
“Your body heals essential organs first,” the God King continued. “Your eyes come late in the process.”
Siris screamed, flailing.
The God King smashed his head against the floor again.
All went black.
DEVIATION
THE FIRST
RAIN BLEW against the window of Uriel’s cubicle.
A window. He had worked hard for a window. Mary had pushed him to reach for that achievement. When you worked every day with numbers and abstractions, she said, it was good to be able to look out and see the world as it was—not as simply figures on a page, to be added and assessed.
There are numbers out there too, though, Uriel thought, looking out the window. Natural laws commanded the rain. Unseen statistics and figures determined where each drop would fall, how hard each would hit, the precise route each would take sliding down the glass. It was well beyond the abilities of mankind to calculate those figures, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.
“So,” Adram said nearby, “I told her that she’d better turn down the oven, because it was about to get a lot hotter inside!”
The regular team of coffee-mug-holding, suspender-and-tie-wearing marketing fellows laughed at Adram’s joke. At least Uriel assumed it was a joke. He didn’t understand why it was funny. Too many jokes didn’t make sense when you broke them apart, not logically. The numbers didn’t add up to laughter. Not for him.
He turned back to his smartdesk, lifting his stylus and making a few notations on a screen already full of numbers and ledgers.
Nearby, Adram leaned with one arm on the wall of the cubicle nearest him. He continued to chat as people passed. Some joined his group while others moved off. But Adram kept talking. Always talking. The man never seemed to get anything productive done.
Normally, Uriel could ignore him, but today it was tougher. The numbers . . . the numbers were so worrisome. Uriel needed quiet, not this constant blathering. Who had thought it a good idea to put an actuary next to the marketing department?
Uriel raised his hand to his forehead, kneading it as he tapped his smartdesk screen, bringing up percentages. If this happens . . . He brought up another list of percentages. Not if. When. It will happen.
Each calculation spelled out disaster.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t what people wanted to hear from him. They got angry when he told the truth—as if it were his fault. As if he could make the numbers do anything.
He wished so much that he could.
Perhaps I can sugarcoat this, he thought. I could present the more optimistic side. Like they’re always telling me to.
He glanced at the picture on the top of his desk. Jori, wearing a baseball cap. No. No, Uriel would not sugarcoat what could happen if this technology were released. He would have to tell the truth. For his son’s sake.
That would make him unpopular, but why did they order a risk-assessment analysis if they didn’t want to hear the findings? Executives were so odd. All except for Mr. Galath, chairman of the board. He always seemed to listen. He was one of the only people who made Uriel think this company had anything of a future.
Adram’s chatter finally died down. Uriel glanced over. It looked like people had passed on to do actual work for once, leaving Adram alone. The tall, overly smiling man glanced at Uriel.
Please, no.
Adram sauntered over to Uriel’s cubicle. “Ho there, Spunky!” The man placed a hand on Uriel’s shoulder. “You’ll have good news for us at the meeting, right?”
“I will have facts, Adram,” Uriel said, prying the man’s fingers from his shoulder. “Nothing more or less.”
“Sure, sure.” Adram took a sip of coffee, then gestured toward the desktop and its display of neat ledgers. “You can really make sense of all that?”
“This is my domain,” Uriel said. “I can make the numbers speak—assuming I care for them, encourage them. Control them.”
“You make it sound like you’re a king, Uriel.” Adram laughed. “King of the ledgers.” He leaned down. “You’ll make them speak good things about Project Omega, right?”
“The numbers do not lie. I will say what they tell me.”
“They don’t lie. Cute. Look, Uriel. If you are so good with numbers, why do you always see the opposite of what everyone else knows?”
“Everyone else is wrong.” Wasn’t that obvious?
Adram sighed. “You realize that this is why nobody likes you, Uriel.”
“That statement is patently false. My wife and son both like me.”
“I wasn’t trying to pick an argument,” Adram said. “I was trying to help you out. As a bud.”
“A . . . bud.”
“Sure.”
“You.”
Adram sighed again, standing up straight. “Project Omega is going to happen, and it’s going to make us all very rich. You count those beans, Uriel. Count them well. And take a piece of advice—for once? Make them say that Project Omega is ready to go live.”
Adram patted Uriel’s shoulder, as if with affection, then he ambled away, raising a hand toward Jane and calling out something flirtatious.
CHAPTER
TWO
I WOULDN’T be here if I hadn’t grown weak, a part of Siris thought.
The Dark Thoughts were stronger now. Siris recognized them as part of himself, and had admitted—to his shame—what he had been. A warlord. A despot. A murderer.
He didn’t remember that person. Whatever had been done to him . . . it had wiped away those memories, permanently. He felt blessed for that, was thankful for it.
The process, however, was incomplete. Those terrible memories had been taken, but that left him with something more primal. Instincts. The brutality of a creature who had lived as a tyrant for eons.
I could have dominated, ruled. I had the Blade. I could have left the Worker alone, could have slain Raidriar. Now . . . now all that is left to me is vengeance.
Siris threw himself to his feet, eyes squeezed shut. For a moment, he let the Dark Thoughts—the shadow of his ancient self—control him.
He caught the God King’s arm as it reached for him. Eyes still shut, Siris spun around, twisting the arm in its socket and popping the joint at the shoulder. Raidriar screamed. Siris felt the man writhing, cursing, spinning into another attack. Siris stepped away, but a shade too slow. The God King’s leg sweep sent him tumbling.
He kicked as he fell, striking where he knew—somehow—the God King would be standing. Siris’s foot connected with something hard—the God King’s knee.
A snap, accompanied by another scream.
Siris moved. No thought. No planning. He scrambled forward, eyes still firmly shut. He couldn’t trust them. Trying to rely on them only got him killed. Over and over.
His hands found an arm. The God King reached a clawlike hand to Siris’s face, ripping at the skin.
Siris ignored the pain, methodically grabbing his enemy by the head and pounding his skull against the floor.
Smash.
Smash.
Smash.
Like a primeval man breaking open a fruit with a tough rind.
Time passed. Siris eventually became aware of himself in the prison, kneeling over the God King’s bloodied corpse. Raidriar, the God King, did not breathe. Siris’s own breathing went in and out with ragged gasps.
His eyes finally worked, but he didn’t see much. An open cell of rough-hewn rock—the soul prison in which the Worker of Secrets had been held.
Much of the floor was coated with dried blood. His, and that of the God King.
This is what I can do, he thought. When I let my Dark Self free.
He forced down those instincts. It was a struggle, one nearly as difficult as killing the God King had been. Eventually, Siris reached forward and pressed his thumbs into the God King’s eyes, bursting them, though the creature’s skull had been cracked wide open by his attacks.
The skull would heal—but the eyes would come last.
“Thanks for the tip,” Siris said, stumbling to his feet.
DEVIATION
THE SECOND
THE TIME for the meeting with the executives, including Mr. Galath, approached. Uriel could do nothing more to prepare, so he diverted himself by summoning some different ledgers. A pet project of his.
Like all ledgers, these did not lie. They showed him that Mr. Galath, the chairman, had been withdrawing resources from the company. Subtly, slowly. Uriel had access to all of the accounts, though he wasn’t technically an accountant. He needed these numbers to create his risk assessment charts.
Mr. Galath was up to something. He was the source of pretty much everything that the company had created, from the satellite technology to the new data compression methods. Galath was a genius—but genius in and of itself was unremarkable. What made Galath special was his ability to run a company at the same time. He was smart, but also wily.
It had only been six months since Galath had revealed the technology that had been christened Project Omega. Teleportation. Real teleportation. Six months of frenzied work to test products, to obtain patents, to prepare for a world reveal.
And yet, during all that, Galath had been subtly moving resources to another, hidden project. One nobody else seemed to know about. But Uriel had found it in the numbers, for the numbers did not lie.
How he wished he could make people act like the numbers did. Rational, consistent.
This is something big, Uriel thought, sorting through the ledgers. Important.
But what? That was Uriel’s pet project. Trying to figure out what it was, to guess what Galath was attempting to accomplish. What would his next wonder be?
As Uriel worked, his screen’s automatic reminder feature pulled up the news of the day. Mary was behind that, as part of her desire for him to pay more attention to the outside world.
He wasn’t certain why she bothered. The news had nothing interesting for him. More killing in the Middle East. The war in South America. Radiation poisoning from the bombs in India.
Wasn’t progress supposed to have brought an end to all of this? What of the wonders of technology? We look down on the ancient days for their brutality, but when people murdered each other then it was by the dozen. Not by the million.
Modern men were the real barbarians.
He closed the news feed and turned back to his spreadsheets. Curious—according to Galath’s schedules, the chairman had been vanishing for long periods lately.
That’s odd . . . Uriel thought, noticing something else. Meetings before each disappearance, usually with someone from the company. Not always executives.
Each time an individual met with Galath in one of these instances, they immediately took a leave from work. So far, none had returned, yet all were still drawing salaries.
He’s gathering them, Uriel thought. The best of the company, judging by the numbers. He’s placing them on the new project. Uriel pulled up some more files, noticing that each person chosen got a promotion around the same time.
He found himself increasingly excited. This was really, really big. The corner of his table screen started flashing. A phone call. He tapped on the square, sending the conversation directly to his implanted earphone.
“Hello?” he asked, distracted.
“Uriel?” Mary’s voice.
He smiled immediately. Her voice . . . it always took some of the tension away. He looked up from his screen. “Hey.”
“I was just wondering,” Mary said. “Is there something special I could get for dinner tonight? Something you’d like?”
He looked down at the hive of numbers. “I . . . I might be working late again.”
“Oh, you needn’t say it so hesitantly, Uri. I know your work is important. Do you know when you’ll be home?”
“Ten?”
“How about I order in something from that Thai place you like so much? It will be waiting in the fridge when you get home.”
“That would be nice,” Uriel said, smiling. “You’re too good to me, Mary.” He hesitated. “But what about Jori? He hasn’t seen his dad in three days.”
“I’ll let him stay up,” Mary said. “He won’t be home until later, anyway. Hockey practice is tonight.”
There was a game this weekend, a championship. It was blocked out on his schedule, marked in red, immovable even if Mr. Galath demanded it. Uriel often worked late—too often—but he’d never missed a game.
“Mary,” Uriel said, leaning down. “I think something is coming. Something amazing.”
“Uri? I haven’t heard you sound this optimistic in a while. Aren’t you worried? About . . .”
She didn’t say it. He wasn’t supposed to talk about work with family, but she was one of the only people who ever actually listened to him.
“I am worried,” Uriel said. “But I think this project is a cover for something greater. I don’t think Mr. Galath intends to release the . . . other thing. He’s watching to see what we’ll say about it. I just . . . I can’t explain. But it’s in the numbers. He’s pulling people aside, one at a time. Telling them about the new project. Preparing them.”
“That’s wonderful! Do you think he’ll choose you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” People, even Mr. Galath, didn’t make as much sense as numbers did.
“We should get you a new suit, just in case.”
“You know I hate shopping.”
She laughed. “All you have to do is try it on. That won’t be so bad, will it?”
“No, I guess it won’t. First dinner, now this. You’re wonderful.”
“I guess I just want to do something special for you, Uri. You’ve been working so hard lately. See you at ten.”
He hung up with a tap on the screen. Rain still washed against the window outside, but despite the dreary weather, he was glad for the window. Mary had been right about that, as she was about so many other things.
He found himself writing down his thoughts, as he sometimes did. A kind of journal, but one filled with his dreams of what could be. What would the world be like if people made sense? What would the world be like if they were not able to kill each other so easily? Could he make the ideas work? He wrote it all down.
“Hey,” Jarred said, walking by. “Aren’t you supposed to be coming to this?”
“Hmm?” Uriel asked.
“The meeting? Mr. Galath? Project Omega?”
Uriel sat up straight, checking the time on his screen. He cursed, sliding his spreadsheets off the virtual table and into the chip in his wristwatch. Some made fun of him for it. So archaic. He liked it better than carrying around an embedded datacore.
“Seriously, Uriel,” Jarred said, shaking his head. “You’re in your own little world, aren’t you?”
Uriel hastened to grab his suit jacket and throw it on while jogging after Jarred.
CHAPTER
THREE
EVEN AS he was slaughtered, Raidriar planned.
Each moment of awareness helped him put together a plot, a method of escape.
Control. He would be in control.
So, even as he died, even as he flailed and struggled, he continued to plan.
It involved holding himself back and waiting for an opportunity. That opportunity was not now.
But it would come.
SIRIS KILLED. And he was killed.
Again and again, they made those same rounds. Sometimes he defeated the God King, and would keep him crippled and broken for weeks on end. But then he’d lose track of the passage of time. He wouldn’t notice that it had been far too long since he’d smashed the God King’s face against the ground.
Sometimes . . . he almost welcomed it. A change. Another voice, just for a few moments. He walked that line, letting Raidriar come just to the brink of recovery.
Because of that, sometimes he lost. When he did, he would swim that void, letting the Dark Self grow stronger and stronger until it broke him free again.
It was difficult to track the changing of days in this prison, particularly while wearing a body that did not age and did not need to eat. He felt hunger, yes—it was perpetual, a horrid scratching inside, as if something were trying to eat its way out. But he did not need food. He was immortal—truly immortal.
He won. He lost. They played this game over and over. Dozens of reversals. Hundreds of deaths and beyond.
Siris gave a brief notice to when he died his thousandth time in the prison. He had already killed Raidriar twelve hundred times at that point. Keeping track of those numbers . . . they were the only things for him to keep track of.
This became his world. His life.
Kill. Be killed.
With each death, the Dark Self grew stronger. Instincts he did not want, but which he seized and used anyway. A primal force that lived inside of him, like a monster bound in fragile, fraying ropes.
A nightmare.
YES . . . RAIDRIAR thought as he awoke from death. Hold something back.
He threw himself to his feet as awareness returned. He struggled, he fought, but he did not give everything.
A nugget of strength, buried within. He would need that. For now, he played the game. He fought back. This time he actually won, blinking his eyes as they restored themselves, looking down at the corpse of the man he’d battered against the wall until his neck broke.
Raidriar took a deep breath and settled down to think, plan, and plot.
SIRIS WAKENED from death and waited for the blow to fall.
He had recovered too slowly this time. Disoriented, he prepared to fight back, to reach up with hands gnarled and twisted. He had begun breaking Raidriar’s hands each time, and so his foe had begun doing the same thing.
No blow fell.
Go! the Dark Self said.
Siris roared to his feet, ready to punch with the backs of his wrists, fingers flopping uselessly. If he could get his arms around . . .
Around . . .
He searched about, blind, swinging this way and that. Where was his enemy? What game was this? Would Raidriar give him hope, then crush him? Raidriar was a fool! Any advantage would be seized, would be used. And—
“I never thought,” a weary voice said, “I would ever grow tired of killing you, Ausar.”
Siris’s eyes finally started picking out light. He backed away from the shadow near the voice and put his back to the wall of the prison.
Shadows became fuzzy images, which slowly became distinct. Raidriar sat on the floor, wearing only a loincloth and a ripped shirt stained with blood. He looked young—too young to be this ancient thing.
No armor, of course. Siris had stripped that from his enemy early on, and had broken it as best he could, pounding it flat with rocks. That was the Dark Self’s influence. Take away the enemy’s weapon. Disarm him. Expose his vulnerabilities before going for the kill.
Raidriar had done the same for Siris, of course. Often, one or the other would use bits of that armor as a weapon to murder his foe as he awoke. Most of the time, they just used their hands.
Raidriar leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes, sighing. “Turns out I was wrong,” he said, his voice echoing in this cavernous chamber, lit dimly by the glow of ancient machinery hidden in the floor and ceiling. “I can grow tired of killing you. It took merely sixteen hundred and fifty-two murders. Apparently, even the most pleasing of tasks can grow mundane by repetition.”
Siris rounded the chamber, keeping his distance. He picked out a chunk of metal, one of their shields, battered and broken, cracked down the middle. He tossed it aside.
“Nothing to say?” Raidriar asked.
“Fifty-one,” Siris said. His voice sounded ragged to his ears.
“What?”
“Sixteen hundred and fifty-one,” Siris said. “That’s how many times you’ve bested me. Not fifty-two, as you said earlier.”
“And of the two of us, you’d trust your own memory above mine?” Raidriar sounded amused. “I thought you knew me better than that.”
Siris grunted. He found his sword, but Raidriar had beaten it against the Worker’s throne over and over, rendering the weapon a mangled mess, broken halfway down. Siris sensed anger in those marks on the rock throne. They were mirrored by marks along the back, where Siris himself had pounded with his shield in a frenzied tempest, frustrated, powerless.
The Dark Self was powerful, but it was also wild, temperamental.
Siris picked up the broken sword.
“How long,” Raidriar asked, “do you suppose he was playing us?”
“I don’t know,” Siris said. “I doubt he originally wanted me to trap him in here.”
“Are you certain?”
Siris hesitated. “No.” He didn’t know anything, not any longer.
“Perhaps you are right, though,” the God King said idly. “What kind of creature could put himself in such a helpless state? Powerless, no control—uncertain if he’d ever be freed? It reviles the senses and the mind alike.”
Warily, Siris walked over near the God King. He passed a portion of the wall that was scraped and bloodied. At one point, the God King had apparently tried to claw his way through the rock—for all the good it did.
Still, in a way he envied his enemy. Siris had been bound here by his soul, same as the Worker had been. Raidriar, however, had simply been dropped in—he was a casualty of location. The prison would keep him as surely as it kept anyone, but if he could get through those rocks, he could find freedom.
Not Siris. He would never be able to escape, not unless he found a way to make someone else take his place.
Convenient, he thought, stepping toward Raidriar, that I have another Deathless here to force into that role.
But how? He’d have to be outside to set up the swap.
“We have to escape,” Siris said to the man he once knew as the God King. “Together.”
“If there were a chance for escape, do you not think that the Worker would have taken it during all those centuries? No. There is no escape.”
“Then what? Continue to kill one another?”
“A little boring, wouldn’t you say?”
Siris reached Raidriar. He hesitated.
And the Dark Self took over.
Siris attacked without planning to. He fell upon the God King, butchering him even as the other man reached up to try to strangle Siris.
When he was done, Siris stood over the dead body, and let himself feel horror.
It’s starting to rule me, he realized.
Once, he worried that these thoughts would return him to being the man he had once been, the callous Deathless tyrant. This was worse, though. Far worse. He had all of that man’s rage, frustration, and skill—but none of that man’s control.
He sank down beside the corpse and sighed, resting his head back against the stone.
DEVIATION
THE THIRD
“IN CONCLUSION, we have a decision to make regarding the product,” Jarred said, standing at the head of the small room. “By far the largest of our potential markets are companies that do a lot of shipping. They can use Omega to cut their costs incredibly. Because of this, I suggest delaying the home user product to focus on an expensive, high-end commercial product.”
Uriel sat in the select crowd watching the presentations. The seats were supposed to be comfortable, but he couldn’t use either of his armrests, as others had taken them. How did people know when to use an armrest and when not to? Was there some rule of sharing the space that nobody had thought to teach him?
The elbows of large executives crowded him on either side, making him feel scrunched in his seat. He glanced over his shoulder. Mr. Galath sat at the top back of the tiered room, in a row all to himself. He seemed . . . profound, with that short, greying beard and those deep, unfathomable eyes. Quite possibly the greatest inventor who had ever lived, and certainly the greatest mind of their time. He sat and watched, and did not say anything.
“Well, that’s really interesting,” Adram said from his seat. “Because I think the opposite.” The lanky man sprang to his feet, edging Jarred off the stage. He swiped Jarred’s presentation from the wallscreen.
“See, the problem with going for a few corporate clients,” Adram said, “is that it just doesn’t capture the imagination of the public. We have something new here, something incredible!”
He swiped something up onto the wallscreen, a splashy graphic with two metal bands at the center. “I call it InstaBe.”
“InstaBe?” one of the executives asked with a flat voice.
“Instant-being,” Adram exclaimed. “Personal teleportation.”
“It doesn’t work on living things,” another executive said. “Inorganic transmission only.”
“I’m sure Mr. Galath will figure out that little limitation eventually,” Adram said. The smile he gave was so transparent that Uriel rolled his eyes. “And even if he doesn’t, InstaBe will still be a smash hit. Look, most companies, they never have a real chance to grip the public. They release their products into a tempest of a marketplace, and have to scream just to get the smallest bit of attention.
“We won’t have that problem. Everyone is going to want an InstaBe. They’ll want five or six! Park your car and go for a hike? You can teleport it to your location when you’re done. Always losing your wallet? Stick a ring on it, teleport it to yourself when you need it.” He grinned even wider. “We’re gonna change the world, folks!”
“It’s not safe,” Uriel said.
Adram stilled, his smile cracking. He forced it back on immediately, not showing his annoyance.
“It’s perfectly safe,” one of the executives said. “Thousands of teleportations made, no mishaps.”
“The technology itself is safe,” Uriel said. “But it is not safe to give to people. They will kill with it.”
“Come on, Uriel,” Adram said. “Give us the bright side, remember?”
“There is none,” Uriel said. “People will teleport bombs into secure locations. Criminals will be armed, no matter where they go. Those are just the minor applications. Militaries will be able to move supplies and equipment instantly. Imagine assault teams who can summon tanks and artillery at the snap of their fingers. This will embolden the governments who have it. They will strike. I have run the numbers, the statistics. What we have developed is a weapon. It will be treated like one.”
“Guesses,” Adram said.
“I don’t guess,” Uriel said. “I project. And I am rarely wrong.” He turned in his seat, looking up at Mr. Galath. “I have a son, sir. I don’t want him to live in a world that isn’t safe . . . Well, a world that is less safe than it is now. If we release this, the result will be war.”
Mr. Galath nodded slowly. He understood. He got it. Uriel relaxed.
This was what he was waiting for, Uriel thought. Someone who would speak out against the technology. It seems I am the only one bold enough.
“He is right,” Mr. Galath said. “We must sell it to governments first, as they will pay the most.” He looked at Adram. “Your name . . . Adram, is it?”
“Yes, sir!” Adram said, walking down off the stage and toward the audience.
“I would speak with you after the meeting. You show great initiative. I have a special project I may wish you to be part of.”
Uriel gaped. He found himself standing. “But . . . No. Sir, not him. Not—”
Adram slapped Uriel on the shoulder, drawing close. “Hey, Spunky. Thanks for the help. You’re a real . . . pal.”
The meeting broke up, leaving Uriel standing on the front row, stunned.
What had just happened?
CHAPTER
FOUR
SIRIS LOUNGED on the stone chair, one leg up over the broken and ruined side, the bloody corpse of Raidriar at his feet.
The God King’s body held Siris’s broken sword, rammed through the back, hilt pointing upward. That wouldn’t stop Raidriar from returning to life, but it was a convenient place to hold the weapon.
“In a way,” Siris said to the empty room, putting his feet up on the back of the dead man, “this is perfect! I was raised to hunt you down and kill you, don’t you see? That was my purpose. To be the Sacrifice, to face you. Now I get to live it, over and over! It’s the only thing in the world!”
Siris laughed, cackling, unable to control himself. How long had it been? Years? He’d killed Raidriar well over two thousand times now. He didn’t remember how many, exactly. He’d have to ask, next time his footstool started moving.
What a state he was in! If he controlled the Dark Self, Raidriar won their contest, and Siris was driven deeper and deeper into madness by repeated death. So he let the Dark Self rule, and this happened! This primitive version of himself that moved by instinct. It was madness too!
He threw back his head and laughed again, tears rolling down his cheeks.
Light split the sky.
Siris laughed at it. A fine hallucination. He often dreamed of escaping, of the roof of this chamber splitting to reveal the top of the pillar, lowering down. The promise of freedom . . .
He looked closer. It was real.
Siris started, leaping to his feet, his laughter dying. That was no hallucination. The entrance to his prison was a large triangular pillar that lowered down from above. Light—real light—outlined the prismlike column of stone. Beautiful. Perfect.
He wiped his eyes, then stepped over Raidriar’s body, which was beginning to twitch. Siris pulled his mangled sword free of his enemy’s back and held it forward, his hand trembling. He could barely see for the light. Those shadows on the platform . . . figures?
The Dark Self responded instantly. The Worker had returned! Siris screamed and ran forward, sword raised—
“Siris?” Isa said, pulling back her hood as she stood on the pillar. “Is that really you?”
Siris stumbled to a stop.
“It is you,” she said in her lightly accented voice. She cursed in her own tongue, leaping off the platform and rushing to him. Behind, on the pillar, several bound figures fought against the ropes holding them.
“Siris . . .” Isa said. She hesitated, reaching toward him, then withdrawing her hand.
He looked down at himself. Clothing that was little more than rags, most of it bloodstained. A full beard and scraggly hair—he’d shorn it at one point, using the dull sword, but it was still a matted mess. He clung to that broken, half-bladed sword as if it were the Infinity Blade itself.
He looked up. Seeing Isa . . . reminded him.
I am a man, he thought, not a monster.
Was that true any longer?
He dropped the sword with a clang, then stumbled past her onto the platform. There, he collapsed and curled up beside the bound figures.
“Siris?” She stepped up and knelt beside him. “I’m sorry. It took so long to find a way to unlock this prison . . .” She reached down, doing something on the floor.
A flash of blue light.
“It is now attuned to one of these two I brought,” Isa said. She kicked one of them down onto the floor of the prison, then the other. “Two, just in case. We captured them both together, anyway. You are free, Siris. I—”
She cut off.
Scraping came from behind.
Siris opened his eyes. Raidriar had risen, and was staggering toward the platform as well.
FREEDOM.
The prison was unlocked. Raidriar had to get onto that pillar. If he did, he could go free. His soul was not bound to this place. He simply needed to reach that column.
It was time.
The first thing he did was lock away the frayed parts of his soul. One grew accustomed to this, after thousands upon thousands of years of life. The complex refit that transformed a person from mortal to Deathless protected the mind, to an extent, from the weathering of the ages. However, being killed time and time again over the course of many months . . . that affected the psyche.
Raidriar could not allow such a thing. He had to remain in control. Later, he would take the memory of his murders and cleanse them, healing the more dangerous mental wounds. For now, he quarantined them and focused his attention on his surroundings.
He stumbled as he stepped through the horrid prison—a prison for a god, a person that should not be—passing two tied-up figures on the ground. Poor fools.
A weapon. He needed a weapon.
Ausar stumbled to his knees on the platform. Freedom. A woman grabbed him by the shoulder—Raidriar recognized her, the woman Ausar called Isa. She steadied Ausar while trying to pull out a crossbow to level at Raidriar. She also had a long knife at her belt.
That would do.
Raidriar used the reserve, the portion held back. During their confinement, he could see that Ausar had fought with everything he had. How like him, always overextending. Forever passionate, but frequently out of control.
It was what set them apart. This made Raidriar a king, while making his former friend simply a glorified warlord.
Raidriar sprinted forward, feet steadying. The girl was obviously expecting weakness in him such as Ausar displayed. What tenderness she showed for the fallen man. Raidriar noted it with a portion of his mind as he slammed into her, knocking the crossbow aside before she could shoot.
The bolt loosed, hitting the ground and bouncing off stone into the darkness. The woman grunted, reaching for Raidriar, but he twisted away while grabbing the hilt of her belt knife. He whipped it free, dancing to the side on the pillar, the knife out.
Freedom. He could taste it.
Yes, there was tenderness in the way she held Ausar’s arm. Had he taken a lover in this new form, with his mind still like that of a child? The old Ausar would scream to know of it.
“I could have let the crossbow bolt hit as I reached the pillar,” Raidriar noted, “but it is not for one such as you to kill a god.”
“Raidriar,” Ausar said, reaching out, lifting his head. “I . . . I am ready to talk . . . as you wished to do those weeks ago, when we stopped our fight.”
Raidriar inspected the knife. A fine weapon, forged from folded steel. It would do. “I think not,” he said.
Then he slit his own throat.
SIRIS WATCHED the God King’s body slump lifeless against the pillar. This time, it would not heal, would not recover. In this position, his soul could escape through the hole in the ceiling.
“What,” Isa said, “was that?”
“Freedom,” Siris mumbled. “How long has it been?”
“Almost two years,” Isa said, recovering her knife and shivering visibly. She kicked the God King’s body, making sure it was dead, then stepped up beside Siris again.
So short? Hell take me . . . I could have sworn we were in there for a millennium.
The Dark Self growled within him.
“Come on,” Isa said, kneeling and triggering the platform. It rose slowly into the air, stone grinding stone. “A lot has happened since you were imprisoned.”
As the stone pillar reached the roof, Siris watched the two figures below slowly consumed by darkness. One of them escaped her bindings and ripped the sack from her head.
Siris was left with the image of her scrambling for his broken, pitiful excuse for a sword, clutching it as the other figure ripped free of his bonds . . .
DEVIATION
THE FOURTH
URIEL WIPED digital spreadsheets from the top of his desk, sliding them out of the way with an annoyed gesture. He grouped others, bringing them down and arraying them beneath his fingers.
The numbers. What did the numbers say? Mr. Galath . . .
Why? Why couldn’t Uriel make sense of the world like he could these sheets and statistics? He was never wrong—not with numbers. When they’d demonstrated the Sympathetic Thermal Conduction mechanisms, who had guessed the exact bids that each participant would present? Uriel. When Mr. Galath had come forward with his Advanced Artificial Entity matrix, who had predicted to the day—to the day—how long it would take the government to develop regulations? Uriel.
The numbers didn’t lie. War. Why would Mr. Galath want war, after all of these years? Any of their devices could have been used militarily. They’d always put protocols in place to prevent such things. Now . . . now they went to militaries and took bids.
What was the man working on? The new secret—it had to be incredible, amazing, transformative.
Uriel would find the answer. Men should make sense. If they listened to reason, they would make sense. Perhaps if governments focused more on what was logical, rather than killing one another, the world would work as it was supposed to.
Adram passed by. “Staying late?” he asked.
Uriel didn’t look up.
Adram patted him on the shoulder anyway. “Look, no hard feelings. I don’t mind that you tried to sabotage me.”
“You don’t?” Uriel asked. That didn’t make sense, even if he had been chosen by Mr. Galath. Uriel looked up, but Adram really did look pleased.
“You should be angry at me,” Uriel said. “I tried to stop you from getting your way.”
“Nah. It’s cause and effect, Spunky. It’s like . . . you’re hardly a person. No offense there! It’s a compliment. You’re like a machine. Data in, data out. No emotion!”
Uriel pressed his fingers against the table until the tips were white. The display warped, spreading a little halo of color around each finger. “Did he say . . . ?” Uriel barely kept his voice in check. “Did he say what it was about? The special meeting?”
Adram leaned down. “I’m gonna live forever, Uri boy.” He winked, grinning, then stood up straight. He obviously shouldn’t have said anything, but the bounce to his step as he moved off—humming to himself and doing a little slide on the carpet as he took the corner—spoke volumes of his euphoria.
Live forever? Impossible. Even for Mr. Galath.
Or was it? Uriel turned back to his spreadsheets, then hunkered down. He spent an hour teasing information from accounts that were nested inside subsidiaries and shell corporations, and a strange string of answers began to form. The moon? What was Mr. Galath doing on the moon? And these bunkers around the country? Uriel couldn’t think what else to call them, judging by the specs and supply lists.
Mr. Galath was getting ready for war. What have I become a part of? Suddenly nauseous, Uriel sat back in his chair. No place on the planet would be safe. If the greatest mind of their time wanted war, then what safety could there ever be?
His eyes drifted to the picture of his son sitting in its little frame on the desk. Uriel stared at that picture, taken two years ago. In fact, he looked at it so often that he was sometimes surprised when he saw Jori in person—the child didn’t quite look like the picture.
Uriel knew that little piece of paper better than he knew the son it represented.
What am I doing? he thought. Death was coming. Destruction. Hell . . . it was already here, in most of the world. And Uriel worked late nights, looking at a picture instead of holding his son?
He stood up and shoved his chair aside and looked at the clock. Seven. Jori would be home from practice for dinner in a half hour.
A half hour. He could make that.
He didn’t bother to shut down his desk or its screen as he left. That felt sinfully negligent to him, and so he found himself smiling.
He had worked all his life for Mr. Galath. The man had taken Uriel’s sweat, but he would not have Uriel’s blood. Not tonight.
CHAPTER
FIVE
THE SCHOLARS of ancient days had a great deal to say about the soul. They claimed that the idea of an immortal soul was simply wishful imagination. Instead they spoke of the Quantum Identity Pattern: a state of matter that could be attuned to a certain configuration—a set of memories and a personality.
The Q.I.P. allowed every person to remain themselves even as their cells died and were replaced. Scientists explained that there was nothing “eternal” about personality—that it was an illusion, but one that could be manipulated. They said the illusion could be perpetuated, associated with one form after another, to create a sense of a continuing identity.
Raidriar rejected these explanations.
Yes, this science had given him immortality. The scientists themselves, however, did not see the majesty of it all—they saw only bits and numbers. When your eyes were forever squinting at a single tile, you easily missed the beautiful mosaic of which it was part.
He was immortal. The scientists were wrong, and their explanations were the frantic excuses of little men failing to grasp something vast. It was Raidriar’s self—now free from that prison—that flew on wings of time, to true freedom. It was the God King who opened his eyes in his Seventh Temple of Reincarnation. It was really him, immortal ruler, who gasped in a lungful of fresh air—starting these lungs breathing for the first time.
He was not just some personality, fabricated from quantum entanglement and made active by chemical process. It was him. A new body, but an ancient soul, seizing again the life that was his birthright.
He breathed in and out, lying naked on the table, looking up at a fine bamboo ceiling. He did not like how familiar that feeling of death was becoming. Even with his mind partitioned, the trauma of his captivity sequestered, it was like septic flesh. He knew he had died far too often recently. He could not banish every memory of his captivity. He needed some recollection.
Without that, after all, he would not be able to summon the proper spirit of divine wrath against those responsible for his imprisonment. Yes, a little memory would help his vengeance be all the more sweet. Memory of what Ausar had done to him, memory of his pain and frustration.
Vengeance . . . against the Worker.
As Raidriar’s Devoted hurried into the room to serve him, he contemplated his rage. An ember deep within. Not a fire—no, a fire consumed and left its host as ash. An ember was a truer flame—less transient, more powerful.
Yes, he hated Ausar, but that hatred was nothing compared to his hatred of the Worker. It was so clear now, how the Worker had manipulated them all.
Raidriar’s Devoted knelt around his table, eyes down, for he had not yet covered his face. One of them—a hook-nosed man that Raidriar recognized only vaguely—held out a ceremonial mask to him, head still bowed.
Raidriar sat up. He had constructed this room to evoke a sense of serenity. A hushed brook bubbled outside, accompanied by the sounds of rattling bamboo. The floor was draped in finely woven mats, the room lined with plants instead of metal. Metal surfaces reminded him of the old days. Days before . . .
He despised those days.
“How long has it been?” Raidriar asked, reaching for the mask. “How long was I . . . away?” Men such as these did not need to know the details of his imprisonment.
“Nearly two years, great master,” said the Devoted offering the mask.
Two years. An eyeblink by the reckoning of the Deathless, but still a dangerous amount of time. What plots had the Worker executed during such a period? Dared Raidriar hope that the creature had spent the time licking his wounds and recovering from his long imprisonment?
Raidriar took the mask. “Where is Eves,” he asked, “my High Devoted?”
“Dead, great master,” said the hook-nosed Devoted. “Six months ago, in bed. We believe it was his heart.”
Pity. Raidriar had grown fond of Eves. Still, he was accustomed to the fleeting lifespans of mortals. He could not turn a corner without half of his staff dropping dead from one silly malady or another.
He moved to put on the mask, but froze. Quick breathing from the Devoted. Sweat on their brows. Had that been a tremble in the voice of the one who had spoken?
Raidriar narrowed his eyes. There, on the inside of his mask, he spotted a tiny row of very fine needles. Needles that would pierce his skin as he placed the mask over his face.
Poison.
So, he thought, you got to my Devoted, did you?
How inconvenient.
Raidriar twisted from the table, bringing a fist down on the shoulder of the lead Devoted. He then smashed the metal mask into the face of another. The rest leaped to their feet in a frantic, terrified scramble.
“The prophecy is fulfilled!” one of the Devoted yelled, lunging for Raidriar. The fellow was a thick-necked man with wide hands. Raidriar let the man get hold of him, bringing them close enough together that Raidriar could press the mask—and its traitorous needles—against the man’s face. He fell, twitching.
“The Dark Father has arrived!” another was crying. “To arms, to arms! It is—”
That Devoted was cut off as Raidriar grabbed him by the throat and spun him about into the path of several others, who had just pulled out swords to attack. The man he held went down in a spray of blood, and the two who had slain him stepped back in horror at having stabbed their ally. One even dropped his bloodied sword.
Raidriar kicked that up into his hand and sliced it through the man’s neck in one smooth motion.
“Thank you,” Raidriar noted, then caught another Devoted by the arm as the man lunged for him. Raidriar twisted the man about, pulling free his shawl, then kicked him aside. Raidriar reached up and twisted the shawl about his face to hide it from these lesser beings.
“And thank you,” he said to the shawl-less Devoted as he rammed the sword through the man’s back. It was convenient that his priesthood could be so helpful, even as he slaughtered them.
He was still naked save for the shawl, but at least the most important part was covered. These treacherous dogs were not worthy of gazing upon the visage of a full Deathless—even if it would be the last thing they saw.
Four remained, including two who had run into the room when they heard the yell for help. Raidriar’s Devoted could all fight—he made certain of it—but they were no match for him. He was a Deathless with thousands of years of practice, not to mention a body crafted to the peak of physical capability. It was hardly a fair fight.
Still, one of these could always get in a lucky blow, which would be problematic. Raidriar backed carefully around the fallen High Devoted, whom he’d hit first. The man was groaning but climbing to his knees. Raidriar planted a foot in the man’s stomach, then cracked him on the head with his sword butt.
Nearby, a set of armor on the wall awaited Raidriar. It hung on its mountings, opened up like the husk of an insect recently shed. With that, he could . . .
But no. They were ready for his arrival. The living Devoted regarded him as they would a snake. Shouts still sounded down the hallway, passing the word of his awakening.
The Worker had prepared this place well. The armor would be a trap.
Raidriar lunged for it anyway.
The four Devoted relaxed. The change was subtle—a slight lowering of the swords, a release of breath. Ten thousand years taught one to notice such things, if you paid attention.
And Raidriar did. He always watched and studied. He was a king—and you could not properly dominate that which you did not understand.
His lunge for the armor was a feint—he hit the release latch, tumbling the suit to the floor with a crash. He leaped across the slablike table where he had been reincarnated, then separated one of the Devoted from his arm with a swing. The man went down, screaming.
The other three engaged him at once. On one hand, he was proud that they showed such bravery in fighting, rather than fleeing. But on the other, he was disgusted. They knew the ancient protocols known as the Aegis code. True honor lay in engaging foes one at a time. Raidriar himself had instituted these codes millennia ago, seeking a more honest form of combat between men. Even the most brutish of his daerils followed the code. To have his Devoted ignore it, particularly in fighting Raidriar himself, was an insult.
He dispatched the three with little trouble. Such a waste. He stepped over to the High Devoted, but the man was out cold from the knock to the head. That left only the one whose arm he had separated from its shoulder. Raidriar strode over and lifted the bloodied man into the air with one hand.
“What did he say about me?” Raidriar asked, curious. “How did he turn you?”
The Devoted squeezed his eyes shut and started whispering a prayer. To Raidriar himself, of course.
“I’m right here,” Raidriar said, shaking the Devoted.
“I will not listen to you, demon. You may wear the form of my master, but you are not him. He warned us of your coming. In his truth I bask, in his name I die . . .”
“A Soulless,”Raidriar guessed. “The Worker has given my crown to a Soulless, has he?”
A Soulless—a copy, a body awakened without the actual Q.I.P. to inhabit it. Such a thing was possible, but creations such as this were unstable, their memories flawed, their personalities erratic.
“I put protocols in place to prevent something like this,” Raidriar said to the Devoted he held. “Why did you not spot the lies? You were trained better than this.”
The Devoted was too busy dying to reply.
Raidriar sighed, dropping the Devoted in frustration. The rest were dead or unconscious, save . . . Yes, the bulky man that still wore Raidriar’s mask. He knelt beside the fallen Devoted, noting the steady rise and fall of his chest. Raidriar pulled the mask free, needles sliding out of the skin of the cheeks and neck. He smelled the poison . . . what was left of it.
Nightdew. It was meant to bring unconsciousness, not death. A temporary way to incapacitate a Deathless. Left too long under the influence of such drugs, the soul would break free to seek a better vessel, but it would work for a time. The Worker would rather not have Raidriar killed and his soul freed to travel to another rebirthing chamber.
He checked the armor next, but as he’d suspected, it was useless. The joints of the elbows and knees had been welded together. If he had stepped into it and allowed it to enclose him with its automatic locking mechanism, he would have been trapped and immobile.
They should not have tried the mask. If he had simply been allowed to put on that armor . . .
He stood, increasingly annoyed, and investigated the deadminds in the room. He was locked out of any important systems. He could access the lesser functions, however—likely he had been left some small amount of control, so as to not arouse his suspicion should he look at his deadminds before putting on his armor. But anytime he tried to change something, the deadmind gave him some kind of excuse, speaking in a flat-toned feminine voice. The excuses were what might have been called “error messages” in ancient days.
He did manage to find an image of himself, supposedly created only one week before. A powerful figure in lean, smooth armor. The face was masked, so it might not matter if the fake was a true Soulless or not, but it was his voice that accompanied the image.
“My loyal Devoted,” the recording said, “cower and give awe. My prophecy is at hand, and my enemies work to deceive you. Stay alert and serve your lord.”
It did sound like him, but it grandstanded too much. The Worker liked theatrics, but Raidriar despised them. One could know merely by looking at him—seeing the way that he stood, hearing the way he spoke—that he was of the elder Deathless. Trying so hard to emphasize it only made the impostor seem pathetic.
Raidriar shook his head, keeping alert for the arrival of more foes. Daerils would be on their way, those who had been built for fighting. One would not be a problem, but several of them might possibly stand against one of the Deathless.
Raidriar turned to leave the mirrorlike deadmind, but hesitated. What was this? A tidbit of information that he could see, but not manipulate. Prisoners in the dungeons. Not the Soul Cells, but the ordinary cages for mortals. Could it be . . . ?
He could find out nothing more. Well, he would need to pass near those cells in his next task, which would be to reach the central deadmind core of the temple. Perhaps it would be profitable to make a slight detour to investigate.
Before that, however, some clothing was in order.
The armor was useless—no profit in trying to repair it, for he hadn’t the time nor the resources. He pulled some cloth from a cabinet and affixed it about his waist in the form of a simple wrap that hung from waist to knees. It was an appropriate costume for a god, despite its simplicity. The wrap left his chest exposed, displaying a body perfected—it had a certain classical elegance to it.
The cabinet also contained a gold-plated necklace. He picked it up and activated its light-bending properties. The device still worked, and bore no needles or other traps. Likely an item with such simple magic had been beneath the Worker’s notice. Raidriar removed the shawl from his face, then put the necklace around his neck.
He turned to inspect himself in the mirror. The necklace projected an illusion around his head, hiding his divine features. The image was that of a regal green mask with dark eyebrows. Larger than life, the jade mask’s features would not change when he spoke.
No, Ausar had been fond of that style of face. Instead, Raidriar settled on the head of the jackal. The ancient symbol had already been old when he was young.
Knowledge of things like that disturbed him, deep within. Those ancient gods . . . they seemed so similar to Deathless. But Raidriar had been alive when the process to create immortals had been discovered. He remembered it. The cold table. The agony of loss. Coming back for the first time . . .
Too much metal. Even still, he remembered that day because of its metal surfaces, reflecting his face . . . and his tears.
Regardless, the first Deathless had been created near that time, and not before. Of this he was reasonably certain. The ancient gods of before his time could not have been Deathless.
But knowing that did not stop him from wondering anyway.
A tall figure darkened the doorway. Raidriar turned, bringing his stolen sword to the side as the newcomer entered. It was a daeril with hauntingly hollow features and a skeletal ribcage that protruded from its skin. It did not attack immediately, but made the sign of an offered challenge.
Raidriar smiled. His Devoted, so civilized, had shown less honor than this brute. The Worker and Devoted alike undoubtedly hoped the daerils would ignore such protocols, but this thing had been created by Raidriar himself. It was better than that.
“It will be an honor to slay you,” Raidriar said, pointing his sword at the creature. “I do enjoy inspecting my handiwork now and then.”
He stepped into the proper stance, and the contest began.
CHAPTER
SIX
SIRIS RODE in silence.
His horse’s hooves beat a familiar thumping rhythm on the packed earth. A . . . horse. His imprisonment had only been two years. This should not feel so strange for him.
Two years and two thousand lives—many of them very short, a few days at most, a few moments at least. He felt those lives all heaped upon him, like dirt upon a newly buried corpse.
Was he supposed to just move on? Forget the pain, the isolation, the anger? If he had just been Siris, he could almost have done it. But the man he had become in that prison, the Dark Self, was not something so easily forgotten.
“I see you managed to grow more facial hair,” Isa said, riding beside him. “Looks itchy. I’ve always wondered—how do you stuff a beard like that inside a helm? Doesn’t it stick out the breathing holes?”
Siris grunted. They rode through dusty scrubland, broken here and then by plateaus and foothills, with distant mountains behind. He remembered passing through this empty place on his way to the Vault of Tears. It seemed like forever ago.
Isa turned their course along the rim of a large plateau. “Typically,” she said, “it is customary for someone who has been rescued in a dramatic way—such as you just were—to fawn over their rescuer. Joyous exultation and all that.”
Siris rode in silence.
“I can say your part, if you want,” Isa suggested.
He shrugged.
“Very well. ‘Gee golly, thanks for saving me, Isa. I sure am happy you done did that.’”
“‘Done did’?” Siris asked, looking up. “‘Gee golly’?”
“Well, I’m not terribly good at accents in your stupid language, but you’re a farmer boy, aren’t you?”
“No. You know what I am.”
“I do—you’re a hero.”
“That’s not what you said when you first found out I was Deathless.”
“I will admit,” Isa said, “I was surprised.”
“Surprised? You were outraged. Betrayed.” He looked away from her, scanning the hilly scrubland. “I understand. I felt the same way.”
“You are a hero, Whiskers,” she said. She sounded like she was trying to convince them both. “At least, that’s how you’re going to act—because that’s what I’ve made of you.”
He looked at her, frowning. She simply smiled, and then guided her horse into a small canyon.
Siris followed, joining her when she eventually dismounted and stepped up to the far wall of the canyon. She pulled back some scrub brush, revealing a small cavern mouth—a tunnel into the rock. Together, they pulled the dead brush away, making a hole wide enough to bring the horses through.
The inside of the cavern reminded him of growing up in the hills outside a city that had been built within an enormous cavern. This was much smaller, but it smelled like home.
How many lives have I lived? he wondered. My home was not truly my home, no more than a crab’s temporary shell is its home. That’s just a skin to be discarded, once outgrown.
They wound through the tunnel, continuing eastward. Isa got out a rod that glowed like a torch when the top was twisted, but it didn’t let off any heat. One of the wonders of the Deathless, he supposed. Had these things been common to him, once? Why did his kind hoard this sort of knowledge? Wouldn’t life be better for everyone, themselves included, if such wondrous items were part of everyday use?
“What did you mean?” Siris asked. “About you having ‘made’ a hero of me?”
Isa continued through the tunnel without answering. Siris followed, growing annoyed, but stopped moving when he heard a noise. It seemed to becoming from inside the wall. He reached for the sword that Isa had given him, but she waved him down.
Stone ground on stone, and a section of the cavern wall slid back. Scout post, Siris realized, noting the holes in the rock he had mistaken for natural depressions. Someone here could send warning—probably by pulling a string or making some sort of noise that would echo in the cavern—if enemies came through the tunnel.
A youth peeked out of the scout hole. Though the boy wore a sword strapped at his side, he couldn’t have been older than fourteen. He stood up straight and saluted Isa, then glanced at Siris.
“Is it . . . him?” the boy asked.
Isa nodded.
The boy stood up straighter. “I . . . um . . . oh! Sir! Mr. Deathless, sir! I’m Jam.”
Siris glanced at Isa. Behind him, his horse snorted and tugged against the reins. Jam blushed, then fished out an apple, which he tossed to the floor awkwardly, then saluted again. “Sorry, Mr. Deathless, sir! Grummers likes his apples.”
“I see,” Siris said as the horse crunched the apple.
“I’ll tell the others!” Jam said, then scrambled down the tunnel. He soon started yelling. “He’s here! She found him! He’s here!”
“What did you tell them about me?” Siris demanded of Isa.
“The truth,” Isa said. “With some extra . . . extrapolation.”
“‘Extrapolation’?”
She tugged on her horse, continuing. He joined her, the tunnel having widened to the point their horses could walk side by side.
“I thought you were dead,” she said softly. “Killed for good by the Weapon. Then the God King returned . . . but worse. In the past, he’s always kept order—too much order for my tastes, but structure can be a good thing.
“Well, that stopped. He let thugs take over cities, allowed chaos to reign. He seemed angry—like he just wanted everything to burn. I hadn’t thought the world could get worse than the tyranny of his Pantheon in days past, but it could. It did.”
“I’m sorry,” Siris said. “It was my failure that led to this.” That wouldn’t have been the real God King, but an impostor of some sort, sent by the Worker. “What did you do?”
“I fled, of course,” she said, blushing. “Left the God King’s lands, found a safe, free city ruled by a lesser Deathless and her cabal. Good taverns in Lastport. I got a job with an information dealer.”
“That’s what I’d have expected from you. There’s no shame in it.”
“No honor either,” she said softly, then shrugged. “News kept coming in of Raidriar’s lands, bad news. It seemed to be spreading all over, infecting lands nearby. I thought of you, and what might have happened to you . . . so I started telling stories. About you—the Deathless who had fought for us, the Deathless raised by a human mother. The Deathless who had died trying to free men from tyranny.”
She glanced at him. “I made up a few doozies, I’m afraid. Really great stuff. You’re the substance of legends now, Siris. I figured you wouldn’t mind, being dead and all.”
“Not so dead after all.”
“Yeah. I was shocked when the stories started to come back to me changed. They spread faster than an autumn cough, Siris—people were telling them all across the land. They latched onto the stories about you. They were all waiting for something to believe in.
“When the stories returned to me, they’d changed to include the promise that you were going to come back. I guess it fits the trope, you know? The returning hero? Nobody from the old stories ever really dies. There’s always another story. It got me thinking. Had I fled too quickly? Had I given up too easily? So I started to dig. I found what had really happened to you. I started to tell stories of your imprisonment too, and people came to me. Well, one thing led to another . . .”
Ahead, light in the cavern indicated an opening. Indeed, the tunnel ended, revealing a small valley and an entire town nestled between hills. People flooded from log buildings. Barracks, by the look of how many of the men carried swords strapped to their waists.
There were hundreds of people here. All coming to see Siris, calling that “he” had arrived.
“You started a rebellion?” Siris asked, looking to Isa. “In my name?”
“Yeah.”
“You started a rebellion!”
“All right, yes, you don’t have to rub it in.” She grimaced. “Against my better judgment, I took charge. Somebody had to. The idiots were getting themselves strung up, making a ruckus but accomplishing nothing. They needed focus, someone to bring together the malcontents from all the villages, organize them. I figured since I was the fool who started those stories, I should be the one to keep the rebels from getting themselves killed.”
She looked at the oncoming crowd. “Honestly, they don’t have much in the way of wit.” She hesitated. “Heart though . . . they’ve got a whole lot of that, Siris. That they do.”
Siris felt a sense of grimness as he watched the people approach, looking at him with awe, hesitance, expectation. Why should this adoration bother him? He’d been raised as the Sacrifice. He was accustomed to notoriety.
Except . . .
The Dark Self—it knew what to do with followers.
Siris had never been trained for leadership. He was a solitary warrior, a Sacrifice sent to fight and to die. The only part of him that knew anything about leading others was that buried part, those instincts he didn’t fully understand.
It responded to the devotion these rebels showed him.
“Well done,” he said to Isa, then smiled proudly at those who had come. “Well done.”
DEVIATION
THE FIFTH
THE RAIN had grown worse by the time Uriel reached his car. It pounded him as he worked to get the door open, briefcase in one hand, umbrella in the other. He climbed in, the car starting on its own. The two-seater vehicle was intended primarily for commuting. Practical. The numbers made sense.
Adram didn’t drive a practical car. He drove a car that growled when you started it. He bragged about it frequently, talking about how he worked on it himself, tweaking the engine. It didn’t even drive itself—it was old, and considered a classic. That made it exempt from the legislation requiring all cars to have a self-driving mode in case of emergency.
Uriel’s car didn’t growl as it started. It hummed pleasantly, and Beethoven—“Romance for Violin and Orchestra”—started playing as Uriel shook the umbrella and pulled it into the car.
“Hello,” the vehicle said in its sterile voice. “Road conditions are reported dangerous. It is strongly recommended that you engage self-driving mode.”
“Like I’ve ever used anything else,” Uriel said. How could he work on the way home if he had to pay attention to driving? He’d purposely bought a car where you had to fold out the steering wheel if you wanted to drive yourself. He tapped on the display, telling it to drive him home, and then blanked the windshield, which tried to show him news stories. Mary’s work again.
Uriel settled back for the drive as the car pulled out of the parking lot—his was one of the last there, other than Mr. Galath’s limo—and took him through the rain to the freeway. He opened his briefcase and tapped idly on the display inside, retrieving some company health insurance reviews he’d been going over. But found himself too distracted to work.
Mary probably won’t even be there when I arrive, he thought. In this weather, she’ll have gone to get Jori so he doesn’t have to ride his bike home.
A surprise, perhaps? Maybe he could pick up dinner. She often got Thai for him, even though she didn’t like it much. Had she put in the order already? He looked up some places, trying to find which had the best deal, until his car pulled through the splattering rain up to his house. It stopped at the curb.
The curb?
Uriel looked up, frowning. Why was there a car parked in his place on the driveway? A bright red car, bulletlike, old-fashioned and dangerous . . .
Adram’s car.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
SIRIS BECAME a leader.
It happened just like that. He gave his Dark Self a little freedom, and it transformed him.
When Isa introduced him to the troops, he knew to nod and commend them on their bravery. He knew to ask the captains if their men were being properly fed, if they needed new boots. He knew to bolster the men with compliments, rather than pointing out that they looked half-trained, that a third of their number saluted with the wrong hand, and that their uniforms didn’t match.
Isa, at his side, relaxed noticeably. “You’re good with them, Whiskers,” she whispered. “A regular dominatrix.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “Where did you get that word?”
“I read it.”
“What kinds of books have you been reading?”
“Whatever I could find! Not enough people read out here—most of them are illiterate. It’s not easy to find books. I read it, and assumed it meant dominating, commanding . . . like a leader, right? No?”
He smiled. “Not really.”
“Stupid language.” She dug out her notebook and made a notation.
Once the inspection was done, they followed the captains to the rebellion’s version of a command center—a log cabin with maps on the inside walls.
As they entered, one of the men asked Isa where to find the latest scout reports, and she just shrugged. “Why are you asking me?” she said. “Talk to the scouts, dimwit.”
Siris smothered a smile. She was hardly a natural leader—while she was clever, she did not know how to deal with people. Not without insulting them a few times, at least.
The commander of Isa’s “troops” was a weathered, white-haired woman named Lux. Those scars on her face, and the way she scowled perpetually, made her seem part daeril. She hadn’t come to meet him with the others; instead, she looked him up and down as they entered the command center, then snorted.
“Hell take me,” she said. “You really are one of them.”
“You can tell by looking?” Siris said.
“You all look like teenagers,” Lux said. “Pampered teenagers with the baby fat still on you.” She turned toward the maps on one of the walls. “Eyes are wrong, though.”
Curious. She had seen Deathless without their helms or masks on, then? Siris filed away the information. “Too old?” he asked, stepping up beside Lux. Isa joined them.
“Yeah, you know too much. But the greater part is because you’re just too damn confident. I’ve never met a boy your apparent age who is so sure of himself. Arrogant, yes. Confident, no.”
He didn’t feel particularly confident—but the Dark Self was. And, he supposed, she was probably right because of it.
“You’ve had combat experience,” he said.
“Served under Saydhi during the Broken Cliffs campaign. Heard you offed her.”
“I did.”
“Permanently? Gone for good?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not supposed to be possible,” Lux said, still looking at the maps.
“It is now,” Siris said. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? I killed her, and you realized that they could be fought.”
She eyed him. “Know too much,” she said under her breath. “Yeah, definitely one of them.”
And, startled, he realized that he did know too much about her. Not this woman specifically, but her type of person. He had lived for a long, long time. Buried deeply within him was an instinctive understanding of someone like Lux. She’d always fought for Saydhi loyally, counting herself lucky at least to not be one of the poor sods who had to work the fields.
That had built in Lux a certain guilt, perhaps even a resentment. She was happy to not have a worse life, but felt that she profited from the sacrifice of so many others. When Saydhi had fallen, it had come to Lux like a moment of revelation and light. The Deathless could actually die. They weren’t gods.
Siris would bet she had resigned her post that very day.
“What kind of training do your soldiers have?” Siris asked.
“As much as I could give them in six months,” Lux said. “We have done a few raids on the God King’s thugs, killing everyone involved and leaving signs to make it look like wild daerils were behind the attacks. He sent troops and wiped out the nearest batch of those, though, so if we try it again we’ll need a different cover.”
She hesitated.
“That was just training,” she continued. “A skirmish, not a full fight. I worried that anything more would reveal us.” She looked at him. “This is not a rebellion, Deathless.”
“It’s not?”
“No. It’s a desperate group of fools who need something to believe in. If you want a real rebellion, you’re going to need a real army.”
“No,” Siris said. “You’re wrong.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him.
“To have a real rebellion, General,” he said, meeting her gaze, “we don’t need an army. We just need to convince everyone that we have one.”
“A lie.”
“Isa tells me that there is a rising air of malcontent,” Siris said. “We need the people out there—the townsfolk telling stories about oppression, the cobblers who are tired of taxation, the farmers who are starving—to believe that fighting back has even the smallest chance of working. Then you’ll see a rebellion. Do you have any intelligence on the enemy?”
“Some,” she said. “I brought what I could with me when I abandoned my post—some stronghold layouts, troop numbers, things like that. A few of the people who joined us also worked for the Deathless, and they brought information too. That, mixed with what we’ve stolen in our raids, gave us something to work from. It’s random and spotty, though.”
“Bring it to me,” Siris said. “I want everything you have.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
RAIDRIAR DISPATCHED the golem—last in a series of combatants—with reluctance. He had been hoping to recover some of these to serve him. Who knew what resources he would be able to find once free of this place?
But it was no use. The golem had only the most basic of deadminds, and Raidriar could not reason with it. It collapsed, shaking the ground with an awful crunch.
I need to be faster, Raidriar thought, moving deeper into the catacombs beneath the temple that housed his rebirthing chamber. The Worker could be sending more resources. Each moment spent fighting was a costly delay.
He had finally reached the dungeons. Raidriar pushed through the doors, sliding his swords into sheaths at his sides as he did so. He’d stolen these off a particularly well-equipped daeril—one he’d been fond of, unfortunately. Despite his initial pleasure at the contest, this business of fighting through the place had left him depressed. He was like a master huntsman being forced to put down his own loyal hounds.
He counted out three cells in the dungeon, each of which was fitted with a thick, windowless door. Breaking down such a door was beyond him, even with his fit body; instead, he took off his ring. It was a simple loop—the type that fascinated his daerils. They carried his old castoffs and failed experiments with great pride. He looked at the small display on the inside of this one. Seven years and three months. Had he really needed that much healing? That would push this brand-new body to its mid-twenties already.
Normally, he wouldn’t care. He had bodies to spare, and this one—like his others—had been modified to restrict hair and nail growth so that healing would not leave him with an unsightly mangle of a beard.
Yet he didn’t know how many bodies he would have access to in the near future. He might need to keep this one fit, rather than running it ragged, healing it to the point that it grew to middle age in the course of an afternoon.
I will have to be more careful with healing, he thought. His body’s Deathless nature would heal him slowly on its own. Unfortunately, when surrounded by enemies and lacking his armor, he had often needed the ring for a quick burst of restoration.
He shook his head, tucking away his ring in a pouch he had tied at his waist. He then fished out his others. One teleportation ring. That could be useful; it separated into two different loops, and when one was activated, it would teleport the smaller ring to the larger. You could use it to summon a weapon in a moment of need, for example. Unfortunately, the process did not work on living flesh.
He tucked that one away and inspected the third. Constructed of black metal, it looked like iron fresh from the forge. He held it cautiously. They knew so little of the element they called Incarnate Dark. Even the Worker had always seemed wary of it, though he—and his scientists—spoke of it in their usual scholarly way, explaining its import in the universe and its influence on the movement of celestial bodies.
To Raidriar, Incarnate Dark was just another tool. A dangerous tool—in other words, the best kind.
He slid on the ring and summoned from it a small shield of force that fit his palm and fingers like an invisible glove. He felt only a faint tingling. An anticipation of energy to come.
He allowed a tiny amount of that energy to seep through, a fraction of a drop of Darkness Incarnate. His shielded skin reflected the energy—or the not-energy—outward. Raidriar pressed his hand against the wooden door.
The door crumpled.
The darkness pulled everything toward it, ripping the door to its fundamental pieces, sucking them inward. Wood cracked and popped, as if an invisible hand squeezed the sides in with an awful strength. In seconds, the Incarnate Dark had been expended, leaving the door in shambles, the greater portion of it simply . . . gone. It had been sucked through the tiny portal in his ring that was connected—like all of the rings—to a distant power.
The cell now open, Raidriar stepped inside.
DEVIATION
THE SIXTH
URIEL ENTERED his house, laughing to himself. The storm would probably cover his entrance, wouldn’t it? Perhaps he should be more quiet.
He laughed anyway. Of course. He moved up the stairs, leaving wet steps. He pushed open the door to the bedroom. Mary screamed, reaching for blankets. Adram scrambled out of the bed in shock, falling to the floor.
Uriel took off his jacket, shaking the rain free. “You know, this makes sense,” he said, chuckling. “The world makes sense for once. I could actually have guessed this would happen!”
Adram—a look of sheer panic on his face—barreled out of the room, carrying his trousers. Mary was weeping. Why should she cry? She hadn’t been hurt.
Uriel sat down on the bed. “I stayed late too many times, I see. That’s a number. I can add that in a column and see what it creates. If it had been another person in the office talking about his wife, I probably would have noticed immediately what was happening.” He looked toward her. “But it wasn’t another man’s wife. It was you. The flaw was never in the numbers. It’s in me. I can’t see them when you are involved.”
“Uriel . . .” she said, reaching a trembling hand toward him. Below, Adram’s monster of a car roared to life.
“Now, now, don’t worry about me. I don’t have emotions, you see. Adram explained it all. I . . . I don’t . . .” That wetness on his cheeks. Rainwater, obviously. He took a deep breath. “Jori?”
She glanced wildly at the clock. “Jori!”
“I’ll go for him,” Uriel said, standing. “I hope he’s not riding home in this. And then, weren’t we going to have Thai? Something special. For me . . .”
Uriel walked toward the door.
“Uriel . . .” Mary said. “I’m sor—”
“Stop. You don’t get to say that.”
He walked out. Where had his smile gone? The situation really was amazing. Perfect, even. That he should be so oblivious. He—
Tires screeched outside.
CHAPTER
NINE
TWO FIGURES—dirtied, blinking against the sudden light—huddled inside the cell that Raidriar entered. A stout, bald man stood up on trembling legs, raising a hand toward Raidriar. Then, the man fell to his knees and bowed himself.
“My God,” Eves breathed, “you have returned.”
Excellent. Eves, Raidriar’s High Devoted, head of his priesthood. “Ever known the truth,” Raidriar said, repeating a passcode set up between him and Eves should there ever be a question of Raidriar’s authenticity. Because of the possibility of Soulless copies, it seemed wise to have such a protocol in place.
Eves’s shoulders relaxed and he looked up. “It is you. Oh, great master. I have failed.”
“I noticed.” Raidriar waved for Eves and his companion, a younger man, to rise. “How complete is the impostor’s domination?”
“I do not know, great master. I was not suspicious of the creature at first. It wasn’t until the second day that I demanded the sign from him. When he could not produce it, I tried to raise the Devoted and Seringal against him. Great master, my rival among the Devoted—Macrom—was ready, and he turned them all against me.”
“Curious,” the God King said. “So he was informed of the plot ahead of time.”
“It seems that way.”
The Worker had found a way to communicate while imprisoned. Had he led Ausar to search him out there in the first place?
The answer was obvious. Of course he had.
“Macrom had been whispering poison to the others for some time,” Eves said. “We who remained loyal fought them, but most of the Seringal sided with the impostor. All that remain of your true Devoted are myself and young Douze. We have been imprisoned here for months upon months, great master. Perhaps years . . .”
Raidriar grunted. He had hoped that Eves would at least have some information for him.
“Great master?” Eves asked as the other Devoted bowed and gave obeisance. “Macrom . . . Did you slaughter him in a particularly painful way?” Eves sounded hopeful.
“Thin fellow?” Raidriar asked. “Upturned nose?”
“That’s him, great master.”
“Hmmm. I may have actually left that one alive. I don’t fully remember.”
“That is . . . somewhat uncharacteristic of you, great master.”
“I haven’t entirely been myself, lately,” Raidriar said, stepping through the mangled remains of the door back into the dungeon corridor. The two Devoted followed, Eves limping noticeably. His robe was stained from old blood and ripped on the left side—the sign of a wound that had long since healed. That was good to see. Raidriar would have been annoyed to find his High Devoted unwounded. Eves should not have been taken alive without a fight.
“Great master,” Eves said, barely keeping pace. “We two are weak, for it has been very long since you vanished, at least by the reckoning of mortals. You deserve much better servants than myself and this one. That stated, great master, I offer my most sincere prayer of thankfulness to you for our rescue. I did not give up hope during the long, dark days, for your triumph was assured. I did, however, worry that I would not be worthy to be released, following my failure.”
Raidriar waved an indifferent hand as they walked the quiet hallways. “You have proven useful in the past, Eves.”
“Thank you, great master.”
“Besides, I’m fond of you. You remind me of your grandfather.”
“Toornik? Great master . . . didn’t you execute him?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes. Sword through the gut after he tried to embezzle tax monies, if I recall. But if I hadn’t liked him, I’d have hanged him by his ankles in the sun and let him starve.”
“Ah, of course.”
The catacombs had grown suspiciously silent. Raidriar frowned, expecting more daerils—or even several Seringals—to appear and challenge him. No further enemies appeared. Surely he hadn’t yet slain everyone in the temple.
No challengers presented themselves as he and his Devoted approached the stone-walled core at the center of the temple. Here, a burnished wall of reflective steel was inlaid with an etched mural depicting Raidriar’s glory.
The God King stopped before it. When had this etching been made again? Two, three thousand years back?
That’s right, he thought, dredging the depths of his organic memory. That blind sculptor who etched by touch. He had taken seventeen years to create this etching. It was exquisite. I really should have visited this more often, he thought as he tore a hole through it with the Incarnate Dark.
Beyond lay silvered surfaces. Like the old days—metal everywhere. He entered, his Devoted following with heads bowed in reverence. Spiderlike machines scuttled along the walls and the draping cords—those tiny machines were the caretakers of this place, this throwback to another time. A far worse time, when men lacked direction and gods were things only found in books. A time that had proven that mankind was incapable of self-rule.
Raidriar approached a mirror that was hooked to a central hub of wires and steel. It was dust-free, thanks to the caretakers, and the mirror . . . the monitor, as they used to be called . . . turned on when he touched it. He tapped slowly at first. How long had it been since he had been forced to use a touch interface for longer than a few taps?
Fortunately, those memories were secure and pristine. He reversed the Worker’s lockout, at least for this one facility. He couldn’t expand his influence farther, unfortunately. The same fail-safes that allowed him to physically take control here prevented him from doing so remotely for his other palaces, rebirthing chambers, barracks, and castles.
Still, it was something. Now that he had full control of this facility, a quick survey of the place showed him that many of the traitorous Devoted and soldiers had gathered in the rebirthing chamber, where he had left their leader. That man slumped in a chair, conscious again, as the others ministered to him. A dozen or two daerils guarded the approach to the room.
Raidriar shook his head. Cowards. A flick of the screen locked them in that room. Another locked the daerils in, preventing them from escaping their hallway. For good measure, he locked all of the other doors in the temple, trapping the rest of the Devoted and the soldiers in their quarters.
These, he gassed to death. There was no such option for the rebirthing chamber, unfortunately.
“Wait,” a voice asked from behind. The Devoted who had been imprisoned with Eves. “Great master? There are ways to release poisonous gas into the chambers of the Devoted? Why would you need something like that?”
“To kill them, obviously.” Raidriar inspected the fellow. Young and narrow-faced, he had very large ears and a malnourished build.
“But,” the Devoted continued, “I mean . . .” He paled, realizing that Raidriar’s jackal-eyed gaze was still on him. He gulped audibly and retreated to the other side of the room.
Nearby, Eves sighed audibly. “I’m sorry about Douze, great master. He’s my sister’s son. I’m not entirely certain he’s suited to your priesthood, but what can one do?”
Raidriar turned back to the terminal, inspecting the state of his empire. It was not encouraging. Since he’d been gone, the Worker had assumed thorough and complete control. Key Devoted and other officials had been replaced and protocols had been set up, subtly, to prevent Raidriar from retaking power. The prophecies were one method, but he found others. His castles and governmental offices had enforced orders for communication silence. Even with control of this facility, he wouldn’t be able to contact others to reestablish his authority. Information could go out from the false God King, and it could go back to him, but the various substations could not contact one another.
But why? Raidriar thought as he searched this station’s records for what little information he could find about the rest of the empire. The other members of the Pantheon . . . wait, what was this? Insults and offenses. The Worker had systematically used Raidriar’s Soulless to alienate all his former allies.
The Worker had gone too far. His empire was crumbling. The policy of isolation mixed with over-insistent demands by the Soulless, and the result was chaos. Raidriar’s lands fracturing, despotic worms—lesser Deathless—seizing territory and grabbing what they could. Villages starving, bandits running wild, untamed daerils raiding government officials . . .
Why would the Worker do this? Why seize the empire, only to abandon it to chaos? The Pantheon could have been a great resource to him, but instead the Worker threw them aside. Isolating the different stations made it difficult for Raidriar to take control, but it also made running the empire practically impossible.
He throws away so much just to hinder me, Raidriar thought. I should be flattered.
He was not. The move did not make sense; the Worker couldn’t have known Raidriar would escape. What was happening here . . . it was insanity.
But the Worker was not insane. He was clever, subtle, and brilliant. Raidriar’s confusion meant that the Worker’s plots were beyond him. Raidriar was too far behind to even grasp what his enemy was doing.
That terrified him.
He checked on a few more items—including his secret kingdom to the south, where he was called by different names. Excellent. That seemed to be untouched. If all went very poorly, he could travel there and rebuild.
He would rather not. It would mean abandoning this empire, admitting defeat, and allowing the Worker to drive this realm into the ground.
Raidriar memorized what he felt he would need from the information, then set the machine to wipe itself. He took his Devoted from this holy hub, stepping out as the spiderlike keepers began to deactivate and drop from walls and wires. They clicked against the ground like falling coins.
He walked from the temple structure toward the sunlight, traveling down a long tunnel that would open onto the plains beyond. How could he reclaim his empire? He would need resources, allies. Unfortunately, going to the other Deathless would be dangerous. They would see him as weak. Beyond that, he wasn’t certain any of them would be all that useful against the Worker. The creature would have them all in hand, and would have prepared for Raidriar to try turning them.
Raidriar needed to do something more unexpected than that—
Thump.
He stopped, looking up out of the metallic tunnel. Something blocked the sunlit sky just outside, casting an enormous shadow. A four-legged monster with tattered wings—half machine, half rotting flesh. No artistry to it at all.
Raidriar sneered. At least he now knew why there had been no further resistance. The Worker had sent this beast. It meant that Raidriar’s escape had indeed been noted, and his edge—if he’d ever had one—was no more.
Bother.
The beast smashed a limb down, crushing the tunnel opening. Raidriar rolled free, weapons out. He heard a pathetic scream from behind. The two Devoted being crushed. Raidriar growled, launching himself forward, trying to get beneath the beast’s four stubby legs. Monsters like this had trouble if you could get underneath them . . .
A large mouth gaped on the bottom of the beast’s body, full of fangs and dripping drool. Now that was just plain wrong. The beast lurched downward, trying to shove him into the maw. Raidriar dodged away. The thing left chunks of decaying flesh on the ground where it scraped and smashed.
“At least,” Raidriar said, “send something of beauty to try to kill me!”
This was an insult—and knowing the Worker, a deliberate one. In addition, there were likely traps set up at other rebirthing chambers. If Raidriar died here, when he awoke . . .
He’d just have to avoid being killed. Raidriar growled as the thing snapped at him with its proper mouth—not the one on its underside, but the one at the end of its long neck. The creature looked like a dragon out of fanciful mythology—some of the Deathless were positively neurotic about creating such things. Only its skin was more leathery than scaled, and along with its long, clawed hands it had four trunklike legs. They’d probably used an elephant as a base, grafting on wings, clawed forearms, and a sinuous neck.
Honestly. Q.I.P. mutants and creations were supposed to make sense, supposed to look dangerous and deadly—not horrifying and monstrous. There was a difference.
As the abomination swiped a clawed hand at him, Raidriar twisted his sword deftly and sheared free a few of the clawed fingers. The machine part of the beast—a large section of its back that leaked ichor—glowed with lights, and the beast screeched in anger. Raidriar dodged another snapping hand.
The head is a distraction, he thought. It’s kept alive by machinery, not by a brain. A kind of undeath.
Raidriar sheathed one sword, then reached into his pouch and fished out the teleportation ring. Then, he raised his blade and dashed at the beast.
“I am not some peasant to be toyed with!” Raidriar shouted.
He dodged under the creature’s inevitable swing, then leaped, slamming his sword into the beast’s leathery side. He used that handhold to heave, pulling himself upward to scramble onto the monster’s back.
Here, he whipped out his other sword. The thing lurched.
“I am not an irritation!” Raidriar rammed his second blade into the monster’s back, using that for a handhold as the thing thrashed and lurched. It smelled awful.
“I am a God,” he shouted, rolling across the beast’s back and slapping the key of the teleportation ring against the machinery keeping the monster alive.
It thrashed again, throwing him free. He slammed to the ground nearby with a grunt, ribs cracking. He rolled over, then took the second half of the teleportation ring and hurled it while activating its summoning property.
The machinery vanished from the beast’s back in a flash of light, then it appeared nearby, teleported to the thrown ring. Only non-living matter could travel with the ring, after all.
The monster dropped with a thump, ichor spilling from the hole.
Raidriar groaned, rolling to his knees. That was the problem with these terrible hybrids. Not organic enough to be considered fully alive, but not machine enough to have proper shielding. He lurched to his feet and walked to the machinery that he had teleported, a lump of metal and wires about the size of a small table. He found the lens, through which he knew the Worker would be watching.
“These are my lands,” Raidriar hissed, leaning in. “And these are my people. Remember that, Worker. You do not take what is mine.”
He picked up a rock and smashed the lens with a swift motion.
CHAPTER
TEN
THIS, SIRIS thought, holding up the next sheet of paper, does not make sense.
Isa was right. The brutality in the God King’s lands was astonishing. Raidriar’s empire was declining rapidly. Barely any coordination between its pieces, local minor Deathless taking up dominion of their little fiefdoms and ignoring decrees from the fake God King, villages starving because shipping had broken down.
He could have fixed this easily, Siris thought, turning to the next report. It’s like he doesn’t care.
A knock sounded at the door. Siris looked up from his reports and maps. He sat in the top room of the command center. It had its own window, which he left open to the cool mountain breeze.
The newcomer was a woman in an apron and a dark grey cotton dress. Nice clothing, for a peasant. She was one of the cooks, likely someone who had run from direct Deathless employ.
“Mr. Deathless, sir?” she asked from the doorway.
“Don’t call me Deathless,” Siris said, smiling. “It’s nothing for me to be proud of. I’m Siris.”
“Siris, sir,” she said, then curtsied. She was one of several dozen who had come to him during the last few hours. Isa was sending them up, he assumed. Soldiers, grooms, the town chandler, and now a cook.
The Dark Self was furious at the interruption, but it adapted quickly. He would need the good will of his minions.
They aren’t minions, Siris told himself forcibly. Hell take him . . . the more he leaned upon the Dark Self, the more those kinds of thoughts crept into his mind.
“What can I do for you?” Siris asked.
“I just wanted to see you,” she said. “With my own eyes.” She looked at him adoringly.
The Dark Self was pleased.
“You’re really going to kill him?” the woman asked. “The God King?”
“I’ve killed him already,” Siris said. “Hundreds of times. I’m going to do something better. I’m going to free us all.”
And after that, he’d be the only remaining Deathless.
She withdrew, and Siris settled back, disturbed at the realization of how desperately he wanted to be the only living Deathless. How much could he trust himself? Once, he’d blamed these instincts on the Infinity Blade, assuming that it was corrupting him. The truth was far more disturbing. There was no corruption—no exterior object to blame. This was him.
The piece of him that knew how to lead, how to inspire men and make them eager to follow, was also the piece that had oppressed and destroyed.
Another sound distracted him from his reports, but this time it wasn’t someone at the door. It came from outside. Siris tried to work, but the boiling dread of the Dark Self—mixed with his frustration at the Worker’s unseen plots—kept him from being able to focus.
Instead, he rose and went to the balcony to investigate the sound—that of children playing. He stood up above, watching them for a time, then glanced at the steps going down. The balcony had its own set, of course. Isa ran this place. There would always be a back way out of any building she ordered built.
The Dark Self wanted him to get back to his studies. So, defiant, he did not.
He started down the steps instead.
ISA SHOVELED soup into her mouth, eating quickly. There was so much to do, now that Siris was actually back. So many people she needed to make sure he met, so many plans he needed to know.
She ate quickly. Little time could be spared for food, even good food like this. The rebellion ate well; she saw to that. She’d keep these people strong.
When the cook returned from upstairs, she sent the next man in line—the last one. A lanky soldier named Drel that the others looked up to. She’d found him raiding Deathless on his own, spreading stories of Siris. Now he’d get to meet the real thing.
She nodded, sending him up the steps. Before she could return to her food, however, she heard a familiar voice coming from the front of the building.
“Hereherehereherehere!” She could barely separate the words one from another. She smiled and stood as TEL scrambled into the room.
The thing—it wasn’t really a he, though she often thought of it that way—wore the shape of a rabbit. A rabbit made completely of entwined brambles, colored like dead brush. It crackled as TEL moved, hopping through the door at a bolt.
“Stop!” she snapped at the thing.
“Master has returned,” TEL said. “Master lives. Oh, this is very good. Very good.”
The brambles suddenly collapsed and a small man-shaped thing made out of wood—matching the floor—crawled out of what was left. TEL took the substance of things he touched, and changed shape at will.
She kept feeling she should be able to find a way to use that more than she did. The thing didn’t like to listen to her, however. She could barely get it to do scouting duty.
“He’s upstairs,” Isa said. “But give him time to get done with the person I just sent up.”
“How much does he remember?” TEL asked, dancing from one foot to the other, like a child needing to piss. “Is it bad, very bad?”
“I don’t know,” Isa said.
He seemed different from the man she remembered—but then again, it had been two years.
“I need to speak with him,” TEL said, moving toward the stairs. She stepped up to stop him, but hesitated as boots thumped on the steps.
“Back so quickly?” Isa asked Drel as he appeared on the steps.
“Well, he’s . . . um, not up there.”
“What?”
“He’s not up there, sir.”
She hated being called “sir.” “My Lady” was far worse, though. She was not, and had never wanted to be, a lady. Confused, Isa stalked up the steps. TEL pushed past her, scrambling up more quickly.
Siris wasn’t in his room. Isa felt a moment of panic. Had an assassin attacked?
Don’t be an idiot, she thought at herself, entering the room. He’s immortal. Who cares about assassins?
She crossed the room, and noticed the door to the balcony cracked open. TEL joined her as she stepped outside.
“So you’re saying,” Siris said from down below, “that being ‘it’ is a mark of dishonor? But if only one person can be ‘it,’ is the position not one of distinction and exclusivity?”
A child’s voice replied. “You’ve gotta chase people when you’re it.”
“And in so doing, emulate the predator,” Siris’s voice replied. “Rather than the prey. Why doesn’t everyone want to be this ‘it’? That seems the preferred mode to me.”
“If everyone wanted to be it,” another young voice said, “then the game would be stupid!”
“But—”
“Just run, mister!” another child said.
Giggling followed. TEL moved toward the steps, but Isa stooped and grabbed him. “Wait a moment,” she ordered quietly.
Amazingly, he obeyed. Isa moved to the edge of the balcony, and found Siris—immortal, Deathless, Sacrifice, and possibly the world’s greatest living swordsman—playing a game of tag with various children of camp.
Isa leaned down, crossing her arms on the balcony railing, watching. Seeing him again had raised an entire host of emotions. Hope that this thing she had begun might actually have a chance at success. Embarrassment for the way she’d treated Siris, all those months ago.
And also hatred and betrayal, deep down. Emotions she didn’t like, but which she also couldn’t control. He was Deathless.
Watching him play tag helped change some of those feelings.
He played for a long while, though eventually the children ran at the dinner announcement. Siris watched them go, wiping his brow, then turned to climb the balcony steps. Only then did he see her.
He stopped halfway up. “Oh! Um.” He looked over his shoulder at the children. “I never—”
“‘Never got to play games as a child,’” Isa said. “I know.”
“Not that I remember, anyway,” he said, climbing the steps to join her. “TEL!” he said, noticing the small creature for the first time.
Isa cocked her eye as Siris ran up. He was more excited to see the golem than he had been to see her? It was hard not to feel a little offended by that.
“Master, you’ve been reborn too many times,” TEL said. “Oh, this is bad.”
“It is bad and good, TEL,” Siris said, sighing. He reached the top of the balcony, and turned to watch the children as they ran toward the dining hall.
“Isa,” he said. “Tell me of Siris.”
“What? Yourself?”
He nodded.
“Uh . . . you’re kind of strange? You are also Deathless, and rather tall. And . . .”
“No,” he said. “Tell me of the man they think I am. Tell me what you told them, the ‘extrapolations,’ as you put them. Tell me the person I need to be.”
She collected herself, gatherin